Noble, Wretched, & Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries to the Indians in Canada and the United States, 1820-1900
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The title suggests that this book concerns missionaries who were “noble, wretched, and redeemable.” In fact, these adjectives characterize the major ways Protestant missionaries described Indians to non-Native audiences. Based on extensive original research, the book adds much “to the literature on stereotype creation.” The image of he noble savage initially inspired Protestant missionary societies to send missionaries westward to convert and to civilize Indians. But by midcentury missionaries confronted a new political order. “The Canadian frontier began to function like the American one,” promoting forced assimilation or removal of Indians. The Hudson's Bay Company gave way to the North-West Mounted Police, and U.S. policy turned toward “war against everything Indian.” In response, missionaries repositioned themselves as agents of pacification among peoples depicted as wretched, bloodthirsty, and cannibalistic. Approaching the century's end, missionaries lost control over “education, farming, and other issues” to government officials. Responding to this loss of positions, missionaries re-created themselves as scholars advancing “anthropological and ethnographic pursuits” and offering insights into the specific cultures of flawed but “redeemable” Indian peoples. They guided researchers into the field, published in scientific journals, and received support from secular institutions and learned societies. (Readers, however, should not assume that secularization was complete. As Tisa Wenger and David Daily have shown, Christian assumptions and authorities shaped U.S. Indian policy and practice through the 1930s and beyond.)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".